Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some tanning and marking due to age. Year 1956. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> Apart from the articles on Daumier and Sargent and the oddly-appended dialogue called ‘After the Play’ Picture and Text is quite evi- dently an amiable compliance on James’s part-a little garland of advertisement for his friends Abbey Boughton Reinhart Millet and Parsons and for the publishers who employed them as illus- trators. In his essay on Sargent however some of his comments seem prophetically critical when one recalls how thoroughly the painter’s career bore out James’s misgivings about its future. Dazzled by Sargent’s brilliant technical skill ‘the attentive spec- tator’ is led ‘to ask unanswerable questions’ about ‘a career which is not yet half unfolded’. He finds himself murmuring ‘Yes but what is left?” and even wonder- ing whether it be an advantage to an artist to obtain early in life such possession of his means that the struggle with them discipline s?tonnement cease to exist for him. May not this breed an irrespons- ibility of cleverness a wantonness an irreverence what is vulgarly termed a ‘larkiness’ on the part of the youthful genius who has as it were all his fortune in his pocket? Such are the possibly superfluous broodings of those who are critical even in their warmest admirations and who sometimes suspect that it may be better for an artist to have a certain part of his property invested in unsolved difficulties. (SP)